Monthly Archives: February 2022

Thoughts on Writing Good SRS Prompts, Part 2: Using SRS Beyond Memorization

This is the second part of my thoughts on writing good SRS prompts after reading this guide by Andy Matuschak. In part 1, I mused on what it means for a prompt to be good. One aspect of judging whether a prompt is good has to do with what we intend to learn with the prompt. That is, how good is the learning goal underlying the learning tasks defined by the prompt? But given the diversity of goals that we might have, how do we know if the spaced repetition system is the right approach to achieve them?

To be more specific, SRS is tailor-made for memorization-type learning goals. But ideally, we want to learn things way beyond remembering facts, and it would be very exciting if SRS can be an effective tool for those as well. So this time, I want to focus on the very idea of using SRS beyond memorization. Do we have any reason to believe this is a good idea? What could go wrong? While I want to express certain concerns, I’ll also make some conjectures on how we might address those concerns.

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